The Most Googled Bible Verses — Episode 4: Trust in the Lord with All Your Heart (Proverbs 3:5)
Christians will quickly tell you they believe God exists. But if you ask them if they trust God, they may hesitate. Trust can be a difficult concept to grasp, not because it’s hard to understand, but because it’s hard to do. God gives us the ability to stand on our own and make decisions for ourselves. Putting our trust in Him and letting Him have control of our hearts and lives can be a challenge. But if we really think about what we are saying when we acknowledge that He is, trusting Him should be natural. After all, He is the all-knowing, all-powerful God who never changes and will always do what is best for us. In this episode on Proverbs 3:5, you’ll be challenged and encouraged to give your heart fully to Him.
Read about this subject
- Scripture: Proverbs 3:5; Psalm 118:8; Proverbs 28:26
- “Where Our Hearts Truly Belong”
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Transcript
Kerry Duke: Hi, I’m Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you’ve learned with others.
Here’s a Bible verse many people love to read. It’s Proverbs three verse five: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”
There was a missionary and his family that lived in a third world country. This was a place where poisonous snakes sometimes hid in trees. One day the father came out and saw his little boy playing under a tree in the back yard. He told his son to drop to the ground immediately without asking any questions. “Just do it,” he said. Then he said, “Now crawl to me on your hands and knees.” The boy did what his Dad told him to do. When he reached where his father was, his father told him to turn around and look at the tree where he was playing. A poisonous snake was hanging from a limb just above where his son had been playing. Trusting and obeying his father saved his life. And, as we’ll see, trusting and obeying the Father in heaven will save your soul.
Let’s begin with the first word in Proverbs 3 verse 5: trust. Is there someone you really trust? A close friend? Your father or mother? A husband or wife? It’s good to have someone you have confidence in. It’s a bad thing to be in a position where you can’t trust anybody. We trusted people when we were young. In a way, we had to. We didn’t have much of a choice. A two year-old trusts older people to take care of him. He trusts his parents or his grandparents or uncles and aunts. He depends on them without even thinking about it. They give him food and protection. When they pick him up and hold him in their arms, he doesn’t wonder if they’re able to hold him up without dropping him to the floor. He just trusts them. But as we grow, somebody we trust burns us. Somebody lies to us. Somebody stabs us in the back. Somebody says he will do something for us and doesn’t. You say something in confidence to someone and that person betrays you. So we learn quite early that you can’t trust everybody. That’s part of maturing. It’s a real and sometimes painful part of life.
As we get even older, we decide that there are a few people you can trust. If we can find two or three people, we really trust, then we count ourselves fortunate. And some people have a really hard time trusting others. If you’ve been betrayed by your parents, it’s hard to trust people. If you’ve been burned by a husband or a wife, you may have trouble trusting anybody. If you’ve been abused or mistreated, you may reach the point where you say, “I don’t trust anybody anymore.”
In a way, I suppose all of us feel like this sometimes. When you’ve been burned badly and when it seems people all around you lie and deceive and think nothing of it, it is hard to trust people. Here’s what the prophet Micah said about the people in his day: “Do not trust in a friend; Do not put your confidence in a companion; Guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your bosom. For son dishonors father, daughter rises against her mother, daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own household” (Micah 7 verses 5 and 6). Jeremiah saw the same thing in his day. He said, “Everyone take heed to his neighbor, and do not trust any brother; For every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbor will walk with slanderers. Everyone will deceive his neighbor, and will not speak the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies” (Jeremiah 9 verses 4 and five). So if you’ve ever been aggravated and said, “You can’t trust anybody these days,“ then just remember that prophets of God thousands of years ago in the Bible thought the same thing.
But there is One you can trust. There is One you should trust. You can always trust God. He never lies. The Bible says in Numbers 23 verse 19, “God is not a man that He should lie.“ Titus one verse two says He cannot lie. Lying is against the very nature of God. The Bible even says that it’s impossible for God to lie in Hebrews chapter 6, verse 17. That’s a powerful statement. Even good men sometimes lie when they’re under pressure or scared. Peter said he would never deny the Lord, but he did. But the God of heaven knows no fear. He can’t be pressured or bribed or intimidated. Unlike human beings, God doesn’t lie to get what he wants or to be in control. He is the all powerful, perfect and sinless God who needs nothing from man. So whatever God says, it is the truth and nothing but the truth at all times, with all people, in every circumstance. In his prayer to the Father in John chapter 17 verse 17, Jesus said, “Your word is truth.“ He said in John 10 verse 35 that “the word of God cannot be broken.”
So whatever God says will happen, will happen. When God says a man reaps what he sows in Galatians six verse seven, that means a man will reap what he has sown. When God says in Acts 17 verse 31 there is a judgment day coming, he’s not guessing or making an idle threat. When He says to His people in Hebrews chapter 13 verse five, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” He will not, He cannot, go back on what He said. When He says in Romans eight verse 28 that all things work together for good to those who love Him, He means what He says. You should always trust, not doubt, what God says.
Sometimes we say a person has to earn our trust. And that’s true. But when it comes to trust in God, what more does God have to do to earn your trust? As the Creator, He makes the sun rise. He causes the rain to fall. He gives us food to eat. He maintains the seasons of the year and regulates the temperature of the earth. If God didn’t maintain these things on a regular basis, we couldn’t survive. The very fact that God keeps this universe constant shows that he loves us and that we should trust Him. Of course, they will always be interruptions in the course of creation – things like tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, and other disasters. But those things are the exception of the rule, and they never last long. If we had to face a flood every other day or live through a worldwide drought that lasted 20 years, I can see how it might be hard to depend on the operations of nature. But God‘s creation works the way that it does, in a regular, constant way, because the hand that created it keeps it that way. And we need natural disasters once in a while to wake us up because we tend to take the hand of God in creation for granted. You can trust that the sun will rise and rain will fall as long as the world stands. You can trust that the world won’t overheat or freeze up because God controls the thermostat. After the flood, God promised in Genesis 8 verse 22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” I realize that this verse conflicts with so-called modern science. But the conflict is between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man. The choice as to which is right should be obvious. Genesis 8 verse 22 is a promise from the God who created the universe and sustains it by His eternal power. If He made all of this out of nothing, and He did, then it’s nothing for Him to keep it at the right temperature. So trust what God said.
But people are funny when it comes to trusting God. All you have to do to see that is to read about the Israelites when they left Egypt. God showed them His power in ways you and I have never seen. God told Moses to go to Egypt and lead the Hebrew slaves out of bondage. God told him, “And you shall take this rod in your hand, with which you shall do the signs” (Exodus 4 verse 17). Moses and his brother Aaron went to the elders of the Israelite people and the Bible says Moses “did the signs in the sight of the people” and they believed and worshipped (Exodus 4 verses 30 and 31). In the next chapter, Exodus, chapter 5, Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and told him the Lord said to let His people go. But the proud king of Egypt said, “Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go” (Exodus 5 verse 2). Pharaoh thought the Hebrew slaves didn’t have enough work to do, so he ordered the slave drivers not to give the slaves straw to make bricks. He said let them find their own straw and tell them they had better make the same number bricks as before. That’s when the leaders of the Hebrew slaves came to Moses and Aaron, and blamed them for the trouble. The way they saw it, Moses and Erin didn’t make things better for them. They made it worse. Even Moses didn’t understand. He said, “Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people? Why is it that You have sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done evil to this people; neither have You delivered Your people at all” (Exodus 5 verse 22 and 23).
So when Exodus chapter 4 closes, Moses is ready to free the slaves, and the Hebrew slaves believed God would set them free. But right away they have a setback. The king didn’t set them free like they hoped. They made the same mistake we make. When God told Moses He would free the people, He didn’t say how long it would take. The Lord didn’t say he would deliver them out of Egypt right away the first time Moses met with Pharaoh. Now God had the raw power to reach down from heaven, destroy the Egyptians and lead the Hebrews out of that land—if He had wanted to. But God didn’t answer their prayer that way. And He doesn’t answer our prayers like that. God takes His time answering our prayers. That’s how we learn patience. That’s how we learn to to trust God. When it takes time, sometimes a long time, for God to answer a prayer, you’re being put to the test. He’s teaching you patience. He’s teaching you not to fear. He’s teaching you not to depend on your wisdom. It’s not good for you to get what you’re asking for as soon as you pray. So the lesson we see right away in these Israelites is that trusting God means waiting on God.
But God told Moses in the next chapter, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh” (Exodus 6 verse 1). God said He would do great signs and Pharaoh would let the people go. But when Moses told this to the people, it didn’t help. The Bible says, “So Moses spoke to the children of Israel; but they did not heed Moses, because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage” (Exodus 6 verse 9). And here’s another lesson in trust in God and being patient. Moses told these people what God said, but it didn’t give them any encouragement. It didn’t give them comfort. It didn’t give them hope. I don’t believe at this point at least that it was because they were being stubborn. And I do believe that you and I wouldn’t have done any better if we had been in their shoes. These people were being beaten and driven like animals to work for these Egyptians. It’s hard to take comfort in words somebody tells you when you’re going through great affliction in your life—even if those words are true. You might remember later the encouraging words somebody said to you while you were going through the fiery trial, but at the time words just don’t ease the pain. But you can still trust in God. You can still be patient and wait. You can still have some peace of mind because you know that somehow, someway, in God’s own time, He will do what’s best for you and everyone involved.
Most of you know what God did to the Egyptians. He sent ten plagues. These were severe punishments from God: the water turned to blood, the plague of frogs, the plague of lice, the plague of flies, the death of their livestock, the plague of sore boils, the plague of hail, the plague of locusts, the plague of darkness and the death of the firstborn. And God didn’t send these plagues all at once. He sent them one at a time. The only people that suffered from these disasters were the Egyptians. God’s people, the Hebrew slaves, were spared. With his first born son died, Pharaoh let the people go. So after all those years of suffering, they were finally free. After all the anguish and grief and prayers to God, their prayers were answered. And after waiting all that time, and after seeing the power of God unlike any nation had ever seen, these Hebrews should have learned to trust God and never doubt Him. But they failed. Time and again after they left the land of bondage, they told Moses that he led them out of Egypt to die in the desert. When they reached the border of the promised land, they refused to believe that God would be with them and they rebelled. That’s why that generation wandered in the desert for forty years and died there. You would think that after all they had seen, they would have trusted in God. But trusting the Lord is not a one-time thing. It’s a continual choice you make.
I’m talking about what the Israelites did because the New Testament tells us to believe God and not be like them. Listen to the book of Hebrews in chapter 3: “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: ‘Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tested Me, tried Me, and saw My works forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation, and said, “They always go astray in their heart, And they have not known My ways. So I swore in My wrath, They shall not enter My rest.’ Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; but exhort one another daily, while it is called ‘Today,’ lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, while it is said: ‘Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’ For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3 verses 7 through 19). Now remember, that is written to Christians. We’re tempted just like the Old Testament Israelites to trust ourselves instead of trusting God.
You should trust the Lord. He loves you. He loves you more than anyone else does. He knows you. He knows your weaknesses. He knows your potential. He knows you better than you know yourself. So trust Him. And, He knows the future—your future. He knows what’s best for you in the short term and in the long run. You don’t. He cares for you in ways you don’t even realize. Why would you ever doubt that? Jesus said if He takes care of the birds He made, He’ll take even more care of you (Matthew 6 verse 26).
Trust in the Lord. But that’s not all that Solomon said to do. He said to trust in the Lord “with all your heart.” That’s where the challenge arises. It’s one thing to partially trust in God. It’s quite another to trust Him with your whole heart. The rich young ruler seemed to trust in God up to a point. After all, he was a ruler of a synagogue. He had been a good moral person from the time he was very young. He didn’t lie or steal or disrespect his parents, and he treated others right. But there was something underneath the surface in his heart. He was very wealthy, and he refused to part with his money. According to Mark 10 verse 24, he trusted in his money. That’s easy to do. Money makes us feel secure. We think if we have money, it’ll rescue us and get us out of tight spots in life. We think money will give us security. So this young man didn’t trust God with all his heart, and that came out in the open when he wouldn’t part with his riches.
The problem was not that he had money. It’s that he trusted his money when he should have been trusting in God. There’s nothing wrong with having some savings. That’s wise. But don’t put your confidence in a savings account. Don’t put your trust in investments. Jesus said don’t lay up treasures on earth. Lay up treasures in heaven. That’s trust. Jesus said to put your faith in God, not things or the money that buys them. Serve God and put spiritual things first and He will take care of your physical needs. Jesus said, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6 verses 33 to 34).
The more you read your Bible, the more you’ll see that it all comes down to trusting the Lord and trusting Him with all your heart. God told Noah to build an ark because a flood was coming; Noah trusted what God said and did what God told him to do (Hebrews 11 verse 7). God told Abraham to offer his son Isaac, and Abraham trusted God even though that went against everything he felt for his son (Hebrews 11 verses 17 through 19). The whole chapter of Hebrews 11 is about believing God and doing what He says.
So trust in what the Word of God says. Believe it with all your heart. Don’t put your trust in money. Don’t put your trust in some man. The Bible says in Psalm 118 verse 8, “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.” Don’t put your trust in a politician when it comes to your outlook for the future of this country. Remember that the most high rules in the kingdoms of men (Daniel 4 verse 17). Don’t put your trust in a preacher or a priest or a rabbi. There are no prophets today. There are no infallible men. One of the greatest mistakes today is trusting what a man says instead of trusting what God says.
But although the Bible warns about trusting in other people, that’s not what he talks about in Proverbs three verse five. He says “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean, not on your own understanding.“ Solomon is telling us not to trust ourselves above God. It’s easy to trust in our own wisdom instead of trusting in God‘s wisdom. We learn a lot of things in life. Some of them are good and some of them are not. Some of the things we learn are useful and others are useless. But the average person accumulates a good storehouse of knowledge. And, we tend to pride ourselves in what we know or how much we think we know. If we think we know more than others, it tends to give us the big head. The apostle Paul said in First Corinthians chapter 8 verse one that knowledge puffs a person up. And when that happens, we don’t respect God‘s word like we should. We don’t listen to it because we think we’ve got things figured out on our own.
And sometimes people lean on their own understanding because they’re stubborn. They may or may not be intentionally prideful. They just get into a pattern of thinking a certain way and they don’t want to consider any other angle. Do you remember the story of Naaman the Syrian captain who had the terrible skin disease called leprosy? He heard there was a prophet in Israel named Elisha who could cure him. So he traveled many miles with his servants and came to the house of the prophet. So Elisha sent his servant out to tell Naaman what to do to be cured. The servant told him to go to the Jordan River and dip in it seven times and he would be cured. You would think Naaman would have been happy to do what he was told. But he wasn’t happy at all. He was angry – in fact, he was very angry. Why? Because he had decided in his mind how the prophet was going to cure him. The Bible says in Second Kings chapter 5 verses 11 and 12, “But Naaman became furious, and went away and said, “Indeed, I said to myself, ‘He will surely come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place, and heal the leprosy.’ Are not the Abanah and the Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage.” What was he doing? He was trusting his own understanding instead of trusting what God told him through the prophet. He had it figured out in his mind and thought everything should go just as he planned. The good thing was that his servants calmed him down and talk some sense into his head. That’s when Naaman went to the Jordan River and dipped in it seven times just like he was told. And that’s when he was cured. Now how many times do people do that today? They have their mind made up about how they should live and don’t listen to God‘s word. They have preconceived ideas about how to be saved and don’t believe what the Bible says.
In the same book of Proverbs, Solomon warned about trusting our understanding instead of trusting his word. “All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, But the Lord weighs the spirits” (Proverbs 16 verse 2). Proverbs 28 verse 26 says, “He who trusts in his own heart is a fool.” Proverbs 16 verse 25 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.” And Solomon said this: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, But he who heeds counsel is wise” (Proverbs 12 verse 15).
It’s sad that so many people try to be saved by their own understanding. They trust their feelings. Nine times out of 10 and probably more when you ask people how they know they’re saved, they say, “I feel it in my heart.” But is that what decides the truth? Naman really thought he had the way to be cured figured out; and people today think they have the way to be saved figured out—according to how they feel, not according to the Bible. But there were many people in the Bible who thought they were doing right but were not. Paul said that he truly thought he should persecute Christians in Acts chapter 26 verse nine. Jesus told his disciples that the time was coming when whoever killed them would think they were doing God service (John 16 verse 2). T. W. Brents once said, “We don’t know we are saved because we feel good; but we feel good because we know we are saved.” There’s a big difference between the two.
There’s something else about this that we need to consider. If how we feel makes us saved, then everybody who thinks he’s going to heaven is saved. But that can’t be true. Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” (Matthew 7 verses 21 through 23).
But even if you’re a Christian, and not self-deceived about your own salvation by your own feelings, you can make the mistake of depending on your own understanding instead of trusting in God. For instance, when there’s sin in a church, that church needs to deal with it. But sometimes churches let things go. That happened in the church at Corinth. A man in the congregation was living in sin, the sin of fornication, and it was open sin. People knew about it and talked about it. But the church wasn’t doing anything about it. As a matter of fact, Paul said they were all puffed up instead of being embarrassed. So he told the church at Corinth to withdraw from that brother and not have any company with him. Paul didn’t tell them to do that out of meanness. He told them to do that to bring the man to his senses in hopes that he would repent. And the good side to the story is that the church at Corinth did what Paul said. And it worked. The man repented. He cut off the relationship with a woman he was involved with. We read about this story in First Corinthians chapter 5 and Second Corinthians chapter 2. Now my point is this. Before Paul wrote to them and rebuke them, the church at Corinth was not trusting in God and obeying the Lord. They were leaning on their own understanding. They knew the man was in sin, but in their minds, they didn’t think they needed to do anything about it.
That is exactly what takes place in far too many churches today. They have people living in adultery and fornication and other open, blatant sins and they do nothing about it. The preacher doesn’t preach against it. The elders of the church, if they have elders, don’t confront the people who are guilty. They let it go, just like the church of Corinth did. And if you ask the preacher why he doesn’t call out sin in his sermons, he says, “I don’t think preaching like that helps. I try to be positive. I think we will win more people if we talk about the love of God instead of preaching hellfire and damnation and rebuking sin from the pulpit.” Now what’s that preacher doing? He’s leaning on his own understanding instead of trusting the Word of God. He’s putting his own wisdom above God. I’ve noticed the same thing with elders when it comes to church discipline. Too many elders say, “If we do what the Bible says about withdrawing fellowship, a lot of people will leave and go somewhere else. We think it’s best not to withdraw fellowship from the disorderly because if we do that, we feel that will do more harm than good.” So the standard is what they think. The standard is how they feel. The standard is how many people they can keep at their church. The standard is their own understanding, not the will of the Lord.
But it’s not necessarily something that bad or extreme that causes us to lean on our own wisdom, instead of trusting in God. Quite often we lean on our own understanding instead of trusting in God when we deal with the troubles of life. We try to handle them on our own. We worry more than we pray. We fear more than we trust. We envision how thing is going to turn out instead of putting our trust in God. We try to fix things with our own wisdom without trusting in the providence of God. That’s when we cross the line from being concerned to being worried. That’s what worry is—leaning on ourselves instead of trusting in God. Now of course you need to use the best judgment you can. You should learn from experience and be wiser and know how to handle problems. And you will be stronger when you’ve gone through the furnace of fire. But you won’t ever be wise enough to fix all the troubles of life. You won’t ever be so strong that the heartaches and the sufferings of life won’t bother you. There will always be situations you don’t expect, and they will catch completely off guard. There will always be times when you don’t know what to do or how to feel about what’s happening. And that’s not a time to act like you’ve got everything figured out. When we’re young we think we can answer just about anything. No matter what the scenario is, we have a solution. And we learn in time that we’re pretty naive.
Young preachers are especially prone to think they have all the solutions. They’ve studied hard, read a lot of books, preached a lot of sermons, counseled a lot of people and studied the Bible, so they are quick to speak their mind on all kinds of problems in marriage, raising kids, dealing with church issues, coping with sickness and death and other trials of life. But age teaches preachers they don’t know was much as they think they do. They reach a point where life is so painful and so complex that they have to say, “I don’t know.” And, if they’re honest and humble themselves, that’s when they really start to trust God instead of their own wisdom.
But all of us are guilty of this at times. We try to handle and fix our problems instead of looking to God for help. There are some people who expect God to do everything for them. That’s one extreme. Then there are others who try to do everything themselves. That’s another extreme. We need to do what what we should and depend on God for what we can’t. The Bible says that we should cast our cares upon Him because He cares for us (First Peter 5 verse 7). Instead of using our time and energy to worry and stress ourselves, we need to listen to what Paul said I Philippians 4 verses 6 and 7: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.
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